


yesterday, upon the stair

by scioscribe



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Everything, Crossover, Dark, Gen, Mentioned Silna/Goodsir and Hickey/Goodsir, nonlinear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 09:17:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16302398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Maybe he should talk of this peculiar science to Mr. Hickey, who so delights in the dead, the weight of their limbs and the usefulness of their trinkets.





	yesterday, upon the stair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> Title here is from Hughes Mearns's "Antigonish."

Goodsir received those twenty bodies fresh from their resting places with apologies and what passed for prayer from one so little devout and so much uncertain.  The grave dirt, tumbled off their coffins, was still fresh on their clothes.

He remembers each of them, though not by their names; his mind recorded them by their possession of certain attributes. The man with his enlarged liver and spleen—in the privacy of his own rooms he can call the swelling grotesque—and the woman with the dog bite on her calf, the edges of the wound made indistinct by infection.

Now he thinks his training was too short and too simple. So often those who wound up on his table died of a single cause. He is no doctor, no, he’s learned that. He operates certain levers, that’s all, as though responses are or should be simple. He’s capable of feeding tinned food to a monkey to kill it—cause, effect—but each day reveals how little he’s understood.

What do you do with men who have scurvy and starvation and frostbite and consumption and must each day swallow another helping of lead? Like the ice, their sickness can only build up.

He amputates, on average, two fingers a week. It is irresistible to do the math: to weigh out their limbs and how long they might last in the same way they weigh out the rest of their supplies. How many men do they have now? How many fingers? How much loss can they stomach? (On empty stomachs.)

These questions, as he walks. And walks.

 

 

Early in their first winter, he met a man on a sledge, a man so bundled up in furs that he had no face—no, here his memory lies, elides, for there was a face, just not one in the common way of things. Black lips and hollow cheeks and indelicate stitches. Most sailors make for good seamstresses—they have so much time to practice—and so somehow Goodsir knows without asking that this man is not one of theirs, returning from some hunting party or lead-scouting.  However perfect and Miltonian his English, he does not belong to either of their crews.

If he met him now, Goodsir would ask him for help. But on the day he meets him, he is only looking for lichens. Some of them are edible—reindeer lichen, like tangles of frosted forest, and nut-brown Iceland moss—and there may be some benefit to them. There is so little urgency to those days. They are becalmed in ice, and he is content to be so.

And happy to meet this stranger.

“You look for passage through,” the stranger says.

“Yes. Well, not at the moment, as you can see, but once the thaw comes and the leads open up. And you—” There is no telling by his skin tone. He might be from anywhere, save for that voice. Goodsir has always had a gift for accents. “Are you Swiss?”

“My father was Swiss.” The man tilts his head. “My intended, when I had her, she was likewise; it must be that I am so as well, though no citizen, not a citizen of any place. You do not recoil from me.” He speaks those last words gingerly, as though Goodsir will refute them, will argue, against the evidence of all their senses, that he does indeed.

“No.” He tries to keep his voice gentle. This is a man, he thinks, who has gone north into near-wasteland, and why? To escape his looks? “I have seen all manner of men, scarred and whole.”

“Thou thinkst these scars?” the stranger says, dropping into formality. It must be a kind of retreat for him, a form of running off. He draws a line across one of the creases in his face and his dark eyes, just a moment ago as soft as a child’s, are now mocking. “Nay, marks of assembly; not seams of mending but seams of creation. Alone here on the ice, I will tell you the truth: I was not born of any woman but from lightning and rotted meat bound together by my creator. Not God! No, a man like yourself, a man who thought he could look upon this wretch of his handiwork with love or awe… but in the end only horror. And horror, and horror.”

He is innocent. This is before Hickey, before Gibson laid out on platters, hot flesh steaming in the cold. Before the creature. Before Silence with blood all down her chin and coat. He does not know horror.

“I think the cold’s playing tricks on your mind,” Goodsir says. “Come back to my ship with me, please. Lest me find you a hot drink, some company. Your eyes have grown weary of looking at all this whiteness, you’re searching for shadows. There’s nothing I fear in you.  Nothing to be afraid of.”

“You’re very kind,” the stranger says. He flexes his hands from where they hold the reins of his sled. It looks as though he had dogs there once, but no more: the poor man is utterly devoid of companionship. His tone is delicate again. Goodsir already knows his sentiments will bruise easily; he wishes he could safeguard them. “Yes, I’ll return with you.”

But when Goodsir has walked a little back towards the ships, he turns back to find the stranger as gone as Eurydice. He fled, Goodsir understands, so he could be sure his last words would be kind ones. The poor man. He did not trust his own goodness.

Each day after that, for a time, he makes a broad circuit around Terror and Erebus, searching for his tracks, for some sign. He finds nothing. He could almost think it a dream, but this was in the time before his dreams grew strange and tangible.

Later, he remembers all this with hope. Not for rescue—he is past believing in it—but for rotted meat and pieces and lightning making life again. They have lost so much. Even a patchwork man would be better than a dozen gone.

His gums are bleeding again, his saliva hot. He looks at the fresh meat. This wretch of his handiwork.

He had an uncle who was a butcher. He has not come so very far from that.

And any butcher would be able to piece a cow back together, he's sure. With the right parts in hand.

 

 

For the life of him he does not know why Captain Crozier ordered Hickey punished as a boy. No true ship’s boy, he’s sure, ever received such a lashing. The wounds are both bad and badly-placed; they are liable to infect unless Mr. Hickey is exceedingly careful.

And he has no liking for how the sight of Mr. Hickey’s pale, bloodied backside steals away his anger. He’s not forgotten the sight of Silence enduring Hickey’s band’s rough handling, but now the memory has nowhere to go, not when he is obliged by profession and humanity to keep his own touch so light.

He will not be cruel. Not then.

He cleans and dresses the wounds carefully and talks to Mr. Hickey throughout, whenever Hickey’s muscles tighten up.

“I’m almost done now.” He settles one hand against Mr. Hickey’s hip, meaning to reassure him. “A few minutes more, Mr. Hickey.”

Hickey rests his chin on his forearm. Goodsir sees just the edges of his smile. There's a quiet mockery there, but not enough to wound him. “I’m sure I couldn’t wish for better care. You have tender hands, Dr. Goodsir."

He laughs. "Not so very much. Nor will saying so win you more remedy for your pain than I'll already give."

"You can't blame a man for trying."

"No, I can't." He continues with his treatment. "This is that deep cut just above your left thigh. I can get you something to put between your teeth." He suspects the last thing Hickey wants is for some cry or whimper to escape the room. The men guard their hurts jealously, as though someone else knowing will compromise them. Goodsir is less a surgeon than a confessor.

But Hickey rejects his offer with a twitch of his head. "I don't need it. Only put your other hand on me again."

"Here?"

Hickey's breath catches in his teeth. "Yes. Thank you."

Does Hickey bear a grudge? Goodsir will later have much cause to wonder. But if he does, for what? He has searched his conscience—he truly did all he could as well as he could. The lash-marks healed cleanly and he said and did nothing, he is sure, to hurt Mr. Hickey’s pride any worse that it had been hurt already. Maybe it is the invitation for intrigue refused that Hickey cannot forgive— _Does that ever work for you?_ —maybe it is that Hickey tried, for once in his blighted life, to come at things softly, and Goodsir all but told him he did not have the face for sincerity.

No, he will realize later, it is not that either.

Hickey senses the dark corners in other men’s minds—the cobwebbed places with blood-sticky floors. He will come to believe that Hickey despises him for not doing each and every horrible thing he has ever thought of. Hickey knows all those thoughts by names as his friends. He knows somehow that there was a moment when Goodsir, looking down at him in that close little room, wondered what it would be like to stroke himself until he spent on Hickey’s bared and cat-clawed skin.

And Hickey knows the hot wetness of want in Goodsir's mouth, looking at the red meat he had made of a man. A butcher's sack of choice cuts, that, and thorough, too: he even split open Gibson's bones and hollowed them out for their marrow. He knows that before Goodsir thought of reassembly, he thought of supper.

Like the devil, Hickey knows all Goodsir’s vices, each and every one, and begrudges whatever he denies himself.

 

 

Or perhaps Goodsir gives him too much credit. Perhaps he does not want to admit that this, too, is what Englishmen are.

With all the chocolate back with Crozier's men, though, he has no indulgence here but self-deception. It's such a temptation to believe that only the devil could have corrupted him so.

But it could truly be that Hickey only wanted his hands. Mr. Hickey is, after all, pragmatic: even his cruelty is turned to a purpose. Goodsir's participation in their little band is assured now, after all. He cannot run when there is no place on earth that would take him.

Perhaps in the end, Goodsir's soul is irrelevant to the matter. Only a part that cannot be consumed.

 

 

So he might make another man, a rescuer or a companion. He has been told, after all, that it’s been done before. What is science if not careful replication? And what does he have to do in this place besides study and survive?

Though his thoughts are not clear. His memories gape wide, his reality admits nightmares to caulk the breaches.

How can he remember one particular shamble of a man on the ice when that is now the entirety of his world? He asks so many questions lately and there is no one to answer them. Those he trusts are dead or gone.

He hopes she is safe. God, he hopes she is safe and well. He is no longer clean enough to touch her, if he ever was, but he will remember until his last days—though that is little enough guarantee, lately—the warmth of her against his back.

She could not have answered him, but she could have made the questions stop before they reached his lips.

No more, now.

_So we’ll go no more a-roving._

It is such a fantastic trick the stranger spoke of, he thinks as his boots skid on the rocks, as the strap that binds him to Hickey's boat cuts into his flesh. To reverse all this death with a spark. But what of the soul, if Goodsir still believes in such things? The stranger’s seemed new-minted.

Dead is dead and gone is gone. An empty body full of stale blood has all the weaknesses of his own memory, all the same places for darkness to fester. Maybe he should talk of this peculiar science to Mr. Hickey, who so delights in the dead, the weight of their limbs and the usefulness of their trinkets. He would spend a lifetime teaching Mr. Hickey the art of dubious, blasphemous resurrection just to have Hickey strive someday to bring him back, his doctor on a chain. Goodsir would open his eyes again a new man in full possession of his iniquity. He would do such things then.

Horrors and horrors.

 

 

Not all of Hickey's men have done him harm, most have only been mute party to it. One is even a boy. Once, this would have changed his hopes for them, but no longer.

 _You’re searching for shadows_ , he told the stranger.

_Look no further, then. I cast a long shadow myself, out across the ice. Miles and miles. I think that when I’m gone it will remain._


End file.
